How to Improve Your Intelligence Quotient

How to Improve Your Intelligence Quotient

Your Intelligence Quotient, which stands for Intelligence Quotient, is a scientific assessment of your intelligence derived from standardized tests that measure problem solving abilities, spatial imagery, memory, general knowledge, and other factors. While there are limits based on native intelligence levels, recent studies have shown that it’s possible to increase your intelligence. We’ll show you some ways to make this happen.

Expose yourself in social

Be active in your community, with social media, and with the world around you. The more you are involved with other people, with other opinions, and other ideas, the more you will learn. You may not always agree with what you learn or find out, but by challenging your preconceived notions, you will either strengthen your own beliefs, or adapt, grow, and adopt new beliefs based on new information.

Listen to music.

Not just classical music but any music that you like. It has been shown that by listening to music that you enjoy improves your I.Q. by a few points. You can also listen to music while working, provided it does not affect your concentration on the task.

Reading

Reading is especially important if you want to boost the IQ of your children. Some non-scientific studies have shown that reading can increase a child’s IQ by up to 6 points. Generally I would take these studies with a grain of salt since they are not published in any major journals. However, the fact is that reading will stimulate thought, learning new vocabulary, and helps people make connections between certain events should be good for the brain.

Theoretically, reading material that is both stimulating and challenging should be able to help improve a person’s IQ score. Whether reading a lot of books or difficult material improves intelligence is certainly up for debate. Some people think books and reading ability is linked to IQ, while others disagree. Scientific studies need to be conducted in readers vs. non readers to help determine IQ. I would guess that individuals that read more had a higher level of intelligence, but that’s just a guess.

Take risks with your brain. Have you become a Scrabble master, able toss out 40-point words even when your rack looks like EEIOAUC? Fine, congratulations. Now go become a Sudoku master. When you reach that goal, move on. Become a Go master, or chess expert.

Once you become good at a particular skill, your brain stops working as hard. It doesn’t expend the resources, or trigger that dopamine rush that helps make you smarter. Feel free to continue to wallop the competition in Scrabble, but keep finding new “brain games” to explore.

Play logic/strategy games. In 2008, scientists Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl devised a method that would increase “fluid intelligence”—the ability to draw connections between things, solve problems, and adapt to new situations. By having test subjects pay attention to two different streams of information, they found they exhibited a significant gain in reasoning abilities.

A game based on this study using dual n-back tasks can be found

Play video games. Games can be a great way to stimulate the brain. Try to play a game that is out of your usual range of choices. It will help you think differently. Especially look for games that provide you with problems to solve or force you to think quickly.

When playing first person shooter games, try to get into the atmosphere, look at details, think every move as if it were real. This way you don’t mindlessly finish the game, and you stimulate the brain to think more than just using reflexive actions.

Work on challenging your brain in new ways. Try cryptology, for example. This is when a message is written in codes and you try to figure it out. It’s challenging for some, but after a while may even become enjoyable. All logic puzzles are great.

Do logic and lateral thinking puzzles. These help you explore new areas, and solve problems in different ways.

Practice crosswordsand sudoku. These activities stimulate your mind and thought processes. People may not normally consider word searches thought-provoking, but if practiced in addition to other mind games, they could prove to be easy and stimulating.

Get physical, and exercise your body. Keep your body fit and since it has been scientifically proven, exercising your body and brain will improve the way you think.

Expand your boundaries. Just like sitting at your desk all day is bad for your physical self, sitting in the same mental seat all the time is bad for your brain. To break out of that, make it a lifelong goal to continually learn new things.

Study art and architecture, to see a visual representation of the mind in action.

Try a new way to drive to work, or a novelty such as bungee jumping, or devoting some part of your life to becoming an excellent painter. The “what” is not as important as the actual doing.

New experiences trigger a release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which increases neurons and create a sense of pleasure.

The more you learn, the more you’ll know, and your intelligence will grow as a result.

Think of new ways to do old things. If you drive to work every day, and every day you take the same road, it becomes routine—even if it’s an hour-long commute. You get to know every turn, every pothole, every bottleneck, every red light, and every speed trap. It becomes so commonplace that you stop paying attention to it. You stop thinking. Anything you do by rote will curtail your thinking process. Break that habit.

For example, find a different way to work each day. Some ways may take a few minutes longer, some may be shorter. Do it on the way home, and you don’t have to worry about being late!

If you like to write, try creating a longhand draft first then entering it into the computer when done. Try entering each day’s work as you go. You may discover something about your writing, or about a character, that you didn’t realize as you wrote it out.

Anything that shakes up your mechanical approach to something is a potential rut to break away from.

meditation

Meditation

It is known that meditation can help decrease stress, improve mood, and light up brain activity. Additionally, it can increase performance on intelligence-related measures and increase IQ scores over time. There are many different types of meditation that can be practiced, but one that has been proven effective is Transcendental Meditation. Nearly all types of meditation will improve general brain functioning and cognition, so if you are already practicing your IQ and cognition should continue to improve.

Transcendental meditation involves sitting peacefully with one’s eyes closed and focusing on a specific mantra. This helps your brain focus on one specific thing at a time and can help improve overall focus. Although there are many different types of meditation, if you want to improve your IQ score, I would recommend a focus-oriented approach. In other words, choose a type of concentration meditation as opposed to mindfulness meditation.

Excel in school and have a better career.

There is a huge amount of evidence substantiating the correlation between excellent grades and better intelligence. Good grades are the path to better careers and better ways of life.

Scientific encephalopathy case studies show that the brains of sophisticated professionals are anatomically larger, healthier and having more prominent convolutions, whereas the labour workers have much thinner neocortex, implicating lower than average intelligence. This is because the labourers do not use their brains often.

Intense learning which is required by many challenging, professional careers can certainly trigger neurogenesis and improve brain’s cognitive capacity.